How to type Quotation Mark
" is Shift + ' on a US keyboard and Shift + 2 on a UK one. Press Shift + ' on a UK keyboard and you get @ instead, which is the whole of why the key looks wrong: nothing is broken and the layout is simply the other one. Alt + 34 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and " writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+0022.
Quotation Mark
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+0022
- Windows
- Alt + 34
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 34 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | " | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+0022 | QUOTATION MARK |
Other punctuation symbols
" lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
How Quotation Mark behaves in software
" takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Quotation Mark
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+0022 |
| Decimal | 34 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 22 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 22 |
| HTML entity | " |
| HTML numeric | " or " |
| CSS | \0022 |
| JavaScript | \u0022 |
| Python | \u0022 |
| URL-encoded | %22 |
| SVG | 0022.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If " needs escaping
" is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written ", in a URL it is %22, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why " is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.